Explore the vast range of titles available.

The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. In his other acclaimed books about the American presidency, Fred Greenstein assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. Here, he evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents. Using his trademark no-nonsense approach, Greenstein looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, he provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Greenstein sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day. Presidents and the Dissolution of the Unionreveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times--and what caused others to fail.

An essential responsibility of the U.S. Congress is holding the president accountable for the conduct of foreign policy. In this in-depth look at formal oversight hearings by the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Linda Fowler evaluates how the legislature's most visible and important watchdogs performed from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She finds a noticeable reduction in public and secret hearings since the mid-1990s and establishes that American foreign policy frequently violated basic conditions for democratic accountability. Committee scrutiny of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she notes, fell below levels of oversight in prior major conflicts. Fowler attributes the drop in watchdog activity to growing disinterest among senators in committee work, biases among members who join the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, and motives that shield presidents, particularly Republicans, from public inquiry. Her detailed case studies of the Truman Doctrine, Vietnam War, Panama Canal Treaty, humanitarian mission in Somalia, and Iraq War illustrate the importance of oversight in generating the information citizens need to judge the president's national security policies. She argues for a reassessment of congressional war powers and proposes reforms to encourage Senate watchdogs to improve public deliberation about decisions of war and peace. Watchdogs on the Hillinvestigates America's national security oversight and its critical place in the review of congressional and presidential powers in foreign policy.

This publication deals with the public administration development in Visegrad member states during the last 25 years. The first four chapters describe development of public administration in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. In the last chapter are summarized approaches to public administration development and discussed good praxis that was used during reforms in mentioned states.

With Obama's election to the presidency in 2008, many believed the United States had entered a new era: Obama came into office with high expectations that he would end the war in Iraq and initiate a new foreign policy that would reestablish American values and the United States' leadership role in the world. In this shattering new assessment, historian Lloyd C. Gardner argues that, despite cosmetic changes, Obama has simply built on the expanding power base of presidential power that reaches back across decades and through multiple administrations. The new president ended the \"enhanced interrogation\" policy of the Bush administration but did not abandon the concept of preemption. Obama withdrew from Iraq but has institutionalized drone warfare—including the White House's central role in selecting targets. What has come into view, Gardner argues, is the new face of American presidential power: high–tech, secretive, global, and lethal. Killing Machine skillfully narrates the drawdown in Iraq, the counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan, the rise of the use of drones, and targeted assassinations from al-Awlaki to Bin Laden—drawing from the words of key players in these actions as well as their major public critics. With unparalleled historical perspective, Gardner's book is the new touchstone for understanding not only the Obama administration but the American presidency itself.

Executive orders and proclamations afford presidents an independent means of controlling a wide range of activities in the federal government-yet they are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the controversial edicts known as universal presidential directives seem to violate the separation of powers by enabling the commander-in-chief to bypass Congress and enact his own policy preferences. As Clinton White House counsel Paul Begala remarked on the numerous executive orders signed by the president during his second term: \"Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool.\" Although public awareness of unilateral presidential directives has been growing over the last decade-sparked in part by Barack Obama's use of executive orders and presidential memoranda to reverse many of his predecessor's policies as well as by the number of unilateral directives George W. Bush promulgated for the \"War on Terror\"-Graham G. Dodds reminds us that not only has every single president issued executive orders, such orders have figured in many of the most significant episodes in American political history. InTake Up Your Pen, Dodds offers one of the first historical treatments of this executive prerogative and explores the source of this authority; how executive orders were legitimized, accepted, and routinized; and what impact presidential directives have had on our understanding of the presidency, American politics, and political development. By tracing the rise of a more activist central government-first advanced in the Progressive Era by Theodore Roosevelt-Dodds illustrates the growing use of these directives throughout a succession of presidencies. More important,Take Up Your Penquestions how unilateral presidential directives fit the conception of democracy and the needs of American citizens.

This groundbreaking book is the first to look at administration and administrative law in the earliest days of the American republic. Contrary to conventional understandings, Mashaw demonstrates that from the very beginning Congress delegated vast discretion to administrative officials and armed them with extrajudicial adjudicatory, rulemaking, and enforcement authority. The legislative and administrative practices of the U.S. Constitution's first century created an administrative constitution hardly hinted at in its formal text. Beyond describing a history that has previously gone largely unexamined, this book, in the author's words, will \"demonstrate that there has been no precipitous fall from a historical position of separation-of-powers grace to a position of compromise; there is not a new administrative constitution whose legitimacy should be understood as not only contestable but deeply problematic.\"

Political institutions profoundly shape political life and are also gendered. This groundbreaking collection synthesises new institutionalism and gendered analysis using a new approach - feminist institutionalism - in order to answer crucial questions about power inequalities, mechanisms of community and the gendered limits of change.

On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law, providing every American with the opportunity to have guaranteed health care coverage. The Affordable Care Act-frequently referred to as Obamacare-is almost synonymous with Obama's presidential legacy and reflects a series of key decisions that he made beginning before he took office. As Meena Bose shows, it was Obama's particular brand of pragmatic politics that ultimately shaped the passage of the Affordable Care Act and made a lasting mark on health care reform in the United States. Pragmatic Vision examines eight of Obama's decisions that resulted in the landmark enactment of health care reform, starting with his commitment to health care reform in the 2008 presidential campaign and concluding with his decision to allow for flexibility with its implementation, following technical hurdles and Supreme Court rulings. Bose shows that Obama's steadfast commitment to the issue was crucial to its passing, especially after the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Obama's direct engagement built key political support for the legislation and was aided by the senior White House staff and Democratic leaders in Congress who skillfully navigated the bill to passage just fourteen months after Obama took office. The story of Obama's leadership in enacting the Affordable Care Act is a tale of today's partisan divide and the polarization of Congress. The legislation passed on a party-line vote and continued to divide politicians long after its passage. Nevertheless, despite repeated efforts by Republicans to repeal the law, it is more popular today than ever and seems destined to remain in force until the next stage of reform. Pragmatic Vision is an authoritative guide to this singular achievement of the Obama administration.

A spirited declaration of principles and a timely contribution to a dialogue that is redefining public administration, both in theory and in practice Scholars of public administration have historically too often been disdainful towards politics in the field, viewing political activities and interests as opportunities for corruption, mismanagement, and skewed priorities. Supporters of this anti-political stance have become even more strident in recent years, many of them advancing scientific models for the study and practice of public administration and governance. Michael Spicer argues that politics deserves to be defended as a vital facet of public administration on the grounds that it can promote moral conduct in government and in public administration, principally by bringing to the foreground the role of values in administrative practice. Politics can facilitate the resolution of conflicts that naturally arise from competing values, or conceptions of the good, while minimizing the use of force or violence. Drawing on the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Crick, and Stuart Hampshire, In Defense of Politics in Public Administration argues that value conflict is an integral part of our moral experience, both in making our own moral choices and in dealing with those whose values conflict with our own. This book is a spirited declaration of principles and a timely contribution to a dialogue that is redefining public administration, both in theory and in practice.

Midge Costanza was one of the unlikeliest of White House insiders. But for a time during the seventies, this \"loud-mouthed, pushy little broad\" with no college education was a prominent focal point of the American culture wars. In this book, Doreen J. Mattingly draws on Costanza's life to tell a wider, but heretofore neglected, story of the hopeful yet fraught era of gender politics in late 70s Washington - a history that is not just important to US women's and presidential history but which continues to resonate in politics today.